Method for Treating New Live Rock

[Crow]

Method for Treating New Live Rock

TOOLS

Rubber gloves
Tweezers
Narrow screw driver
A coupe of schooners

PROCEDURE

Remove each rock one by one and shake them in a tub of water. This will remove the loose detritus. Treat all crabs as parasites, as very very few are friendly (commensal/symbiotic). Most of the worms you will encounter are harmless, but there will be no shortage of worms in the long run, so go ahead and remove any loose ones that may be injured. If they are healthy, they will be deep in the rock. Shake the hell out of it. Upside down and in every direction. I use a plastic vegetable scrub brush to loosen large deposits of detritus. I should have stressed the rubber gloves more as well. There are lots of stinging worms that will leave nematocysts (cactus needle-like stingers) in your fingers. I managed to get blood poisoning once from handling live rock without gloves.

Throw any snails you see into a bucket of saltwater and use your new macro lens to get some free identification on here. Watch for mantis shrimp (Google it). They are easy to identify once you know what you are looking for. Yes, kill them.

I would use the established saltwater the rock is in now for the rinsing process. Freshwater rinsing is more for corals that may have parasitic hitchhikers. Live rock is less likely to carry bad guys than live corals are. In the case of live corals, freshwater dips and a bath in an oxidizer such as Lugol’s iodine or potassium permanganate. The water at the bottom of your vats will be turbid/dirty, so make sure you set aside cleaner rinsing water as you work through the vats.

Any sponges, sea squirts, or other invertebrates that have made it this far are hardy and should be left alone. Only new rock should have the sponges and algae removed from it. It is a good idea to reverse the stacking order of the rock as you put it in a new container, so the rock that was at the bottom is now at the top.

Siphon or shopvac the junk off of the bottom of the vats. Remember to elevate the rock on milk crates to provide a buffer zone for crabs, worms and other questionable hitchhikers.

After the rock has been acclimated for two weeks and you have not experienced a significant die-off, you can proceed to introduce a 6 hour photoperiod with somewhat diffused light. If your lighting is greater than 250 watt MHL, then suspend it two feet above the rock. Otherwise, a 250 watt MHL a foot above the water surface should be fine with a 6 hour photoperiod (day). Slowly move the photoperiod up to 8 hours per day over the next two weeks. Watch for diatom algae (brown slime). It will come and go in about two weeks, then you will get green slime algae (cyanobacteria). This too will pass in another month, give or take.

Start monitoring calcium, magnesium, and carbonate hardness levels. Maintaining these at optimum levels will foster the growth of coralline algae.

It’s also a good idea to start sorting rock sizes and shapes so you can have a better handle on your building blocks when you commence with the aquascaping. You don’t want to get down to the bottom of the last vat and find those show size rocks you ordered.

Now that you are sure that your rock has no die-off, you should add ammonium chloride (not household ammonia/ammonium hydroxide) to feed the nitrifying bacteria (nitrogen cycle).

You can simulate a bioload by adding 0.01 grams of ammonium chloride (dry crystals) per gallon of water. This will give you an ammonia level of 1ppm. Check the ammonia level to make sure you got the dose right. Depending on how much of a filter bed you have already established, it will take one day or several for the ammonia to go down to zero. When it hits zero, add a slightly higher dose (0.015 grams/gallon) to render an ammonia level of 1.5ppm. Continue to dose at this level until you start stocking the tank. The livestock will supply all the ammonia you need for the nitrogen cycle.

You will start to see nitrite as soon as the nitrifying bacteria converts the ammonia. It is safe to add livestock once the rock is able to maintain nitrite at zero while you are dosing ammonia, which may take a few weeks depending on your rocks bacterial biodiversity/filtering capacity. Nitrate will start to show in tests after a few weeks of nitrite reduction. The family of bacteria that assimilate nitrate take the longest to establish. Once you have established nitrates below 10 ppm you can start adding sps corals. At this point in time phosphates will be a concern. Throughout this cycling process you need to monitor pH as it may drop with heavy bacterial growth.

Alternatively you can use livestock to feed the nitrogen cycle but it puts a lot of stress on the organisms you use and it is more of a shotgun dosing system. The chemical route is faster and safer.

Dose the ammonium chloride while the rock is still in the holding tanks as it is the rock you are feeding, not the water or filtration devices lying around.

It would be beneficial if you can do the same with the sand. The denitrifying bacteria that consumes nitrate does not even begin to form until the bacteria that converts ammonia to nitrite, and in turn nitrite into nitrate has developed.

De-nitrification (nitrate reduction) is the main goal with sand beds. As I mentioned earlier, this process takes awhile and is the last to start if you don’t treat the tank chemically (ammonia).

Start dosing lightly to be sure of the concentration of the ammonium chloride. You may also mess up the math with displacement etc. An ammonia test kit will assure you end up with the 1 ppm ammonia level you need.

If your rock hasn’t been starved of nitrogen, it will reduce the ammonia quickly (in a day or two). If the water has been nitrogen poor, it will take as long as a week for the ammonia spike to drop to zero.

All your rock needs now is nitrogen (ammonia) and good water flow for oxygen. The biological filtration process is working independent of your protein skimmers and whatever else you are currently using with the rock. If you keep the bacteria on the rock fed and monitor it with test kits, it will jump start your display and fish room. You will not get the diatom algae and green slime algae blooms that you traditionally get. You can also turn your lights and protein skimmer on earlier in the process (right away instead of a few weeks down the road).

Some people use raw organic sources of nitrogen like dead shrimp to inoculate their tanks, but it’s hard to dose and monitor ammonia reduction/conversion. The dead shrimp takes a few days to decay and release ammonia along with protein. It also introduces phosphates and heavy metals that you have no means of assimilating or removing.

Your LFS will have ammonium chloride. Dry crystals are the most accurate, as liquid tends to evaporate and range in concentration.

*Created by: mrwilson